Wordless singing skips over the frontiers between eras. "Da da dum da dum da da." It made a change from four-syllable words beginning with mother. "I suppose it's old, partner, but the beat goes on," Eminem sang on Lose Yourself. This tradition has found an improbable upholder in Eminem, who shares only his ability to fit a lyric to a backing track like a tailor. He began Only the Lonely with "Dum dum dum dum-be doo-wah," and we knew just what he meant. The more percussive noises tend to begin with d: dum, de and doo-be. Lately, their fates have intersected again: both wowed a huge crowd, or allowed the crowd to wow them selves, in Hyde Park - The Boxer at Simon and Garfunkel's show last summer, Hey Jude as the midnight finale to Live8. Both songs were reported, inaccurately, to be attacks on Bob Dylan. When the Beatles recorded Hey Jude, they ended with a great loop of na na-na na-na-na nas, forming a famously long fade-out. When Paul Simon was writing The Boxer, he added an i to make lai luh lai, a chorus that raises the roof every time he and Art Garfunkel bury their differences and go on tour. It's the kind of T-shirt you get very attached to.įor some songwriters, a la is too obvious. Why wasn't clear, but the banana was replaced by a large yellow microphone coming out of it, in tiny letters, was a stream of la-la-las. On Kylie's 2002 tour, the las even reached the merchandising stall, in a T-shirt design paying homage to the Velvet Underground LP sleeve featuring the iconic banana.
Her controlled coquettishness forces the listener to read between the las. When Cathy Dennis and Rob Davis (once of Mud) wrote Can't Get You Out of My Head, they gave Kylie the best song of her career, and the best bit comes when she sings "la-la-la, la-la la-la-la". The best las are to innocence what bittersweet is to sugar. It's the kind of thing that could give a non-word a bad name. "You make me wanna la-la," screeches Ashlee, adding that she will "make la-la in the kitchen on the floor".
It can be innocent, as in "Deck the halls with boughs of holly, fa la-la la-la, la-la la-la", or quite the opposite, as in the recent single La La by Ashlee Simpson, a junior American non-celebrity whose main claim to fame is that her sister (Jessica Simpson) turned her marriage into a TV show. la-la la-la la-lala-LA!" with a sinister charisma that has survived the indignity of being used to sell executive cars.
It can be a mother softly singing her baby to sleep, or Iggy Pop, announcing: "I am the passenger. It's a gregarious creature, and highly elastic. In the beginning was the hum, and the hum was la. It's as old as the hills, which are, of course, alive with the sound of music. But the business of singing without words surely springs from a deeper well. Jelly Roll Morton used the term in 1906, so scat may be about to reach its centenary. Much earlier, jazz singers had a word, scat, for the noises they made before they picked up a lyric sheet. They are joining a tradition that winds back through rock history, via Eminem and Kylie, Pink Floyd and the Ramones, to the Beatles and Elvis, and, further still, to jazz and blues.Īround the time rock was born, a whole genre arose out of wordless singing, called, with suitable onomatopeia, doowop. Like E-Pro, it's dead sexy.īeck Hansen and Alison Goldfrapp, two thoughtful magpies, know what they are doing here. This is not the Faces anthem of the same name, but a new song, wittily constructed out of bits of old disco, electronica, T.Rex and Norman Greenbaum singles. Next month comes another classic of wordlessness in Goldfrapp's new single, Ooh La La. It was banal, meaningless and intensely repetitive, but in context, with a dirty riff loitering behind like a teenager on a family outing, it made perfect sense. Beck's recent single E-Pro had a chorus that went "na-na na-na-na-na NA" (x4). Whatever they're called, this has been a good year for them.
English doesn't have a word for them, perhaps fittingly a friend suggests rockolalia. And James Brown went OWWWWW!īetween words and music lie the sounds we make when we're singing but not using language. Minnie Riperton went lalalalaLA lalalalaLA. Lou Reed went doo da-doo da-doo da-doo da-doo dooo.